Unit name | Constructing the 'Other' in Western Europe, c.1000 - 1400 (Level H Lecture Response) |
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Unit code | HIST39012 |
Credit points | 20 |
Level of study | H/6 |
Teaching block(s) |
Teaching Block 1 (weeks 1 - 12) |
Unit director | Dr. Wei |
Open unit status | Not open |
Pre-requisites |
None |
Co-requisites |
None |
School/department | Department of History (Historical Studies) |
Faculty | Faculty of Arts |
Did Christian society become increasing intolerant, attacking Jews, Muslims and heretics more and more violently? Or did Christians simply imagine others in ways that helped them to define their own identities? Were non-human others, such as animals, angels and devils, imagined differently from human others? These questions have underpinned the work of historians in different fields of medieval Western European history. We will bring together these various fields to pose fundamental questions about the nature of medieval society and to test various explanatory models.
Were some groups defined and persecuted in order to enhance the power of rulers and their bureaucrats? Was there a distinctive medieval concern about purity and taboo? Were some images of the other constructed in attempts to understand the unknown? Are historians misled by a rhetoric of abuse which they over-interpret? Was otherness merely a construction of learned clerics which most people ignored?
Topics will include: heretics, Jews, Muslims, angels, devils, ghosts, concepts of race, class conflict, gender difference, sexual deviance, animals, monsters, travel, lepers.
Aims:
By the end of the unit students should:
Weekly 2-hour interactive lecture sessions
Tutorial feedback on essay
Access to tutorial consultation with unit tutor in office hours
1 x 3000 word essay (50%) and 1 x 2 hour exam (50%)
S. C. Akbari, Idols in the East: European Representations of Islam and the Orient, 1100-1450 (Ithaca, 2009)
N. Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium (London, 1970)
M. Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London, 1966, reprinted 2002).
R. I. Moore, The Formation of a Persecuting Society: Authority and Deviance in Western Europe, 950-1250 (Oxford, second edition, 2007).
D. Nirenberg, Communities of Violence: Persecution of Minorities in the Middle Ages (1996)
J. R. S. Phillips, The Medieval Expansion of Europe (Oxford, second edition, 1998).
J. Richards, Sex, Dissidence and Damnation: Minority Groups in the Middle Ages (London, 1991).
J. E. Salisbury, The Beast Within: Animals in the Middle Ages (New York, 1994).
D. H. Strickland, Saracens, Demons, Jews: Making Monsters in Medieval Art (Princeton, 2003)